NPR – “…For years, a site called Agbogbloshie in Accra was one of the largest e-waste processing sites in Africa, getting 15,000 tons of discarded phones, computers and other used electronics each year. Many Western media outlets depicted the site as a public health and environmental tragedy, rife with toxic chemicals that leach into the water and poison the air. While that’s undoubtedly true, it’s not the full story, according to a new collaborative photojournalism project. The project, called E-Waste in Ghana: Tracing Transboundary Flows, which won this year’s Fondation Carmignac photojournalism award, aims to capture both the positive and negative aspects of e-waste. “The world cannot throw all its garbage here, it has truly negative consequences on the people,” says Anas Aremeyaw Anas, an investigative journalist in Ghana who co-led the project. “But there are positive aspects of sending us e-waste,” he says, as it’s sparked a dynamic, informal recycling economy in the country that, while often dangerous, can also help lift people like Emmanuel Akatire out of poverty. Globally, e-waste is an enormous problem. In 2022, humans discarded about 62 million tons of used electronics, enough to fill a line of trucks that spans the equator. But there’s opportunity too, as those trucks contain over $91 billion of valuable metals, the U.N. estimates, though people like Akatire who do the dangerous recycling work reap the smallest share of those potential profits…”
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